Innovator

When we started to make this game my friend told me "we need a huge eyeball that just f***** you up", and that's where it all began. When I starting working on this I kept trying to figure out how it would shoot its projectiles, and then I realized "what do eyeballs do?" Well they blink, at first we experimented with just 2 frames (one closed and one opened) but the animation eneded up looking very choppy. In the end I was able to create a total of four frames that could loop each time it fired. Creating this object was very different for me, because I am used to using lots of shading with the gradient tool to make it blend together, but for the art style we wanted the shading was completely different. In the end I was very please how this came out.

Of all the things I worked on, although this may seem the simplest, it took wayyyyy too long. I knew we wanted to use a spaceship as the main sprite, and it needed to be something with very distiguishable parts including: the hull, wings, thrusters and cannons. The reason for this is because as the game progresses we want to have a loot system that translates to upgrades for your ship, bigger thrusters-more speed, larger cannons-more damage, and so on. So that meant it couldn't be some UFO looking object. In total I think I created about 15 different unique designs, and probably 5 more for each unique concept that was just moving around the pieces.

Conceptual

This is piece of art I created during the conceptual unit, when we started this unit we were instructed to pick an emotion and an action, how we picked it? Out of a hat. While some people picked combinations like, frustration through cooking, I was fortunate enough to pick scorn through loss, needless to say this was probably the most difficult part of the whole unit for me, simply figuring out what that even meant. After thinking and thinking about how to connect something to my concept, I decided to instead make something first and then interpret my concept around that. The main piece I focussed on was the loss. The trail represent the misleading path that so many people fall down, what starts out as fun and games, sun and rainbows, soon turns into a downward spiral, almost impossible to come out of. The trail around it was meant to give off a darker vibe to represent how everything around the path tells you to turn around, everything about it is supposed to scare you away, yet we ignore it. So many people nowadays claim they’ll do something “just once, just so I can try it, so I don’t have to think about it ever again” but the amount of people that stay true to this is abyssmal.
I wanted to find an eerie looking path way to juxtapose the rainbow trail. In order for the rainbow to fit into my photo without standing out too much, I traced it using my pen tool on a separate layer and then filled in the trail with a nearly transparent gradient from white to black, this way the trail got darker as it went further back. Unlike my previous pieces, I wanted to keep it simple, more than often I get carried away and add random elements and filters to my work that aren’t necessary and end up cluttering my piece. So for this I decided to try something new, after all this is the conceptual unit.